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Hi, I'm Lindsay. And I'm Marshall. Welcome to Tumble, the show where we explore stories of science discovery. Today, we're talking about our hands and fingers. Is it so we can count to 10?

A one, a two. Are you counting those on your fingers? Yeah. Our fingers aren't just for counting.

We're going to find out why each of our hands has five fingers and what axolotles could teach us about them.

Today we have a question from Tumble Listener, Aila.

My name is Aila and I'm six years old now.

I love your podcast and I have a question and the question is,

why does one hand have five fingers?

And what made that?

That's really a great question.

Like, why do we have five fingers? Why not four or six?

Because it would be hard to play piano if you had 20 fingers on each hand.

I don't know. Maybe if you had that many fingers, it'd actually be easier to play. You could do like four songs at once.

That's another way to think about it. Let's ask our listeners, why do you think humans typically have five fingers on each of our hands?

And how would scientists find out?

Think about it, because when we come back,

we'll meet a scientist who spends a lot of time thinking about hands and fingers,

...